Saturday, May 05, 2007

Scientific misconduct at high places ...

A Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize winner (falsification of data), a university Vice Chancellor (fudging his record), a lab director (appropriating credit for other researchers' work), and a department head (plagiarism).

Check out this Outlook story by Debarshi Dasgupta about these four recent cases of scientific misconduct. The good guys who pursue this rather unpleasant job of going after the bad guys belong to the Society for Scientific Values. But their task is not easy:

"The SSV's pressure today is only moral but this body should have the power to blacklist those found guilty, making it difficult for them to get research grants," says Chopra. Seconding this demand is K. Satyanarayana, head of the Intellectual Property Rights and Publications Division at the Indian Council of Medical Research. He says that even now people, when caught red-handed, plead ignorance of ethical issues. "We therefore urgently need an institutional mechanism to deal with this problem." The SSV currently encounters apathy even when it offers clinching evidence to an institute establishing misconduct by one its employees. "We are told not to be policemen—we must just encourage young minds," Chopra points out.

My search for the SSV website yielded one result, which I'm not able to access. It also yielded another: an old essay by Dr. S.R. Valluri, an ex-Director of the National Aerospace Laboratories and a conscience-keeper of Indian science. [Update: This paragraph was edited; see the comments.]